When Ichinoi walks into a bookstore to cool off from the summer heat and inadvertently purchases a BL comic, Urara takes an interest. The two women in question are Yuki Inoichi, a septuagenarian widow who teaches calligraphy in her home, and Urara Sayama, a teenage bookstore clerk and high school girl who happens to be into BL comics. I give you all the backstory about manga because it’s the bedrock on which BL Metamorphosis is built - the comic isn’t Boys Love, but it’s about two women of vastly different ages who come to build a meaningful personal connection through the medium of Boys Love comics. Manga publisher Seven Seas has recently dipped its toes in the water with a handful of series, including Our Dining Table and the classic The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese, and has recently published a comic that is about Boys Love, but not Boys Love at all – BL Metamorphosis by Kaori Tsurutani. Like American romance novels, these comics can range from chaste to explicitly pornographic, although most of them fall in the middle somewhere with various shades of intensity. Publishers like the mostly-defunct DMP popularized the Boys Love subgenre in the United States, and now publishers like Viz Manga (through its SuBLime imprint) are the major touch-point for most fans. In a country that is more socially conservative than the United States, these books are often looked down on, and their readers call themselves fujoshi (a word that is literally translated as “rotten girl”), a reclaimed insult from the early 2000s. The vast majority of these books are written by women. Boys Love comics are a romance subgenre of gay male relationships written from a female gaze and consumed by female readers. Rather than thinking about Japanese comics as a subgenre, it probably makes more sense to think about them like the comics of other nations.Īnd, just like European comics come in a variety of genres and styles, so do the comics from Japan - and one of the most controversial and derided is the genre of Boys Love (sometimes referred to as yaoi or BL in the United States). Because of the high volume of sales and continued growth of the manga market, there’s been an explosion in the variety of available titles to English-language readers. In 2017, Viz Media was 23% of the total US graphic novel market, selling numbers that would make corporate comics green with envy. The truth is that manga, alongside the collective output of Scholastic Books, is comics, at least when you consider things from a market and sales perspective. Manga gets its own section at the library, gets its own shelves at the bookstore, and, as the saying goes, has its own set of adherents. The popular notion of manga in the United States is that it’s a subgenre of comics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |